Few
if any OA advocates will know Grossmann, but publishers surely will. Jacek Ciesielski, Vice
President Open Access at De Gruyter and CEO Versita, emailed me this comment:
“I have known Alexander for some ten years now and we have had a number of
different business relationships during his times at Wiley, Springer and De
Gruyter.”

Ciesielski
added, “You enjoy working in an industry when you enjoy working with its
people. Alexander makes me truly enjoy being an academic publisher. He is one
of the nicest and kindest people I have met in the industry. He is also someone
with a profound understanding of the research community, and of scholarly
publishing; and he is always receptive and open to new ideas and trends.”

And
it is clearly his openness to new ideas and trends, combined with frustration
at the way legacy publishers are responding to OA, which has persuaded Grossmann
to combine his new academic post with a different kind of publishing role, as
President of a privately owned OA venture called ScienceOpen. Co-founded
with Tibor
Tscheke, the new venture, says Grossmann, will feed into and help his
future research.

ScienceOpen
is a “research and publishing network” designed to allow researchers to share
scientific information, both formally by publishing articles, and informally by
reviewing their colleagues’ work, providing endorsements and comments, and
updating their own papers.

Essentially,
it will offer a publishing service that will also enable post-publication peer
review, and which will be embedded in a social networking environment. A beta
site will go live next month, and submissions will start to be accepted in
November. Once the service is properly up and running researchers will be
charged around $800 to publish a full article (Although there will be no
publication fees this year).

Saturday, August 03, 2013

The tenth in a series exploring the current
state of Open Access (OA) the Q&A below is with IEEE’s Anthony Durniak.
Durniak leads
the professional staff that operate IEEE’s publishing and online information
services. He is also responsible for IEEE Spectrum, the
organisation’s flagship monthly magazine of technology trends and insight, and The
Proceedings of the IEEE, the organisation’s leading scholarly journal.

Incorporated in 1896, and headquartered in New York City, IEEE (The
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) is a non-profit corporation
and professional association. It has more than 425,000 members in more than 160
countries, about 51.4% of whom reside in the United States. Membership consists
of engineers, scientists, and allied professionals whose technical interests
are rooted in electrical and computer sciences, engineering, and related
disciplines.

IEEE
is, therefore, a scholarly publisher, although not a commercial publisher but a
learned society.
However, it does work in co-operation with commercial publisher John
Wiley and Sons, Inc. to produce technical
books, monographs, guides, and textbooks.

Today
all IEEE content since 1913 is available in digital format and the IEEE
Xplore digital subscription
library contains more than 3.5 million articles produced from all of IEEE’s
periodicals and annual conferences. It also includes technical standards,
e-books from the IEEE Press-Wiley joint imprint, and publications from other
technical societies.